Free booking software: what's actually free in 2026

Half the articles ranking for this search recommend a plan that no longer exists. That isn't laziness on their part, exactly — free tiers move faster than anything else in this category, because they're the first thing a company changes when it needs revenue. One of the tools that used to be the standard answer to this question dropped its free plan a couple of months ago and most of the listicles haven't noticed.

So rather than rank them, I want to give you the thing that survives the next repricing: every free booking plan is funded by something, and the funder tells you exactly which wall you'll hit.

Who pays for the free plan

There are four ways a booking company affords to give the software away, and they fail differently.

The processing spread. Square and Fresha are payment companies that also schedule appointments. The software is free or cheap because it's a hook for card volume, and the free tier is priced at a slightly worse rate than the paid tier. You pay, just not on the first of the month.

The upsell ladder. SimplyBook.me and Setmore charge nothing until you need a specific thing — SMS, deposits, a fifth staff member — and then charge for that thing. The free plan is a working product with a fence around it. This is the honest model, and it's the one where you can predict the bill.

The marketplace. Some tools give you the software and take a cut of the clients they send you. If you never use the marketplace it costs nothing; if you do, it's the most expensive model on this page.

Your own labour. Easy!Appointments and Cal.com are free the way a used car is free when someone gives it to you. No licence fee, and you now own an ongoing obligation.

Setmore is where I'd start

If you want one recommendation without conditions attached, it's this one. Setmore's free plan gives you four staff calendars, unlimited appointments, a branded booking page, a custom URL, group classes, Reserve with Google, Instagram and Facebook booking buttons, and — the part that surprises people — actual card payments through Square, Stripe or PayPal. Most free plans treat taking money as the premium feature. Setmore doesn't.

What it withholds is worth knowing before you commit a business to it. No SMS reminders, only email. No two-way calendar sync, so your Google Calendar won't push blocks back into Setmore. No recurring appointments, no video appointments, no deposits, no API, and Setmore's name stays on your booking page. Pro is $5 per user per month billed annually, $12 monthly.

The SMS gap is the one that will decide it for you. If your clients are the kind who ignore email — and in beauty, trades and fitness, most are — then the free plan's no-show rate will cost you more than $5 a month within about a week. Reminder timing is one of the few no-show interventions with real evidence behind it, and email-only reminders are a materially weaker version of it.

Here's the condition that would change my recommendation: if you take deposits, stop reading this section. Deposits are Pro-only at Setmore and free-plan-excluded almost everywhere else, so a deposit requirement takes you out of the free tier entirely, at every vendor on this page.

Square is free until your card volume says otherwise

Square's plan structure changed shape recently and the naming now runs Free, Plus and Premium at $0, $49 and $149 per month per location. Free gets you unlimited staff calendars, a booking site, appointment reminders by text and email, prepayments, deposits, digital wallets in the booking flow, and Instagram/Facebook/Google booking buttons. That's a lot for nothing.

The catch is in the fee table rather than the feature table. Square Free processes online card payments at 3.3% + 30¢. Square Plus processes the same payment at 2.9% + 30¢. In person, it's 2.6% + 15¢ against 2.5% + 15¢.

That 0.4% gap on online payments is the actual price of the free plan, and it's easy to work out where it crosses over. Plus costs $49 a month, so the free plan stops being cheaper at roughly $12,250 of monthly online card volume — 0.4% of $12,250 is $49. If most of your money arrives in person, the gap is only 0.1% and the crossover sits closer to $49,000 a month, which almost nobody in this bracket will reach.

Two conditions on that number, because it's the kind of figure that gets quoted without them. It compares online volume only, and it ignores everything else Plus adds — cancellation policies with card-on-file no-show fees, multi-staff appointment booking, the waitlist, class booking and packages, Google Calendar sync, and the Bookings API. Any one of those might justify the upgrade long before the maths does. What the number tells you is narrower and still useful: at small volume, Square Free is genuinely free, and it does not quietly become expensive until you're much bigger than you probably are today.

SimplyBook.me's free tier is a demo, and that's a fair trade

Fifty bookings a month, one service provider, one "custom feature" of your choosing. Payments, deposits and tips start on Basic at $11.90 a month billed annually.

I don't mean "demo" as a criticism. Fifty bookings is enough to run a real month for a solo practitioner starting out, the booking page is properly designed, and the upgrade path is legible — $4 buys another hundred bookings if you just need headroom rather than a tier change. It's simply a smaller free plan than Setmore's, and if you have any staff at all it's a non-starter, because the second provider is a paid upgrade rather than a limit you gradually approach.

Fresha stopped being the free answer in 2026

For years the answer to "free booking software for a salon" was Fresha, and it was a good answer. That's over. Fresha's pricing page now lists two paid subscriptions and a seven-day trial — Independent for one-person businesses and Team priced per bookable team member, around $19.95 and $14.95 a month respectively in US listings — with no free tier underneath them.

This is the single most useful thing to know before you take advice from a page like this one, including this one. Free plans are a market position, not a property of the software. Fresha's was funded by payment processing and marketplace fees, it worked for a long time, and then the company decided the maths had changed. Setmore's and Square's could go the same way next year. Build on the assumption that the free plan you pick is a two-year arrangement, and check that your data exports before you put a thousand clients into it.

Self-hosting removes the licence fee and nothing else

Easy!Appointments is GPL-3.0, about 4,350 stars, and released 1.6.0 in May 2026. It's a competent PHP appointment scheduler with a clean booking page and a Google Calendar sync. Cal.com is free forever for a single individual on their hosted plan and open source if you'd rather run it yourself.

Neither is free in the sense that the rest of this page means. You are taking on a server, TLS certificates, PHP and MySQL version upgrades, backups you have actually tested, and the security patches nobody sends you a reminder about. If you already run a VPS for something else and enjoy this work, the marginal cost is small and the control is real. If you were hoping to avoid a $5 monthly bill, self-hosting is not the cheaper path — a managed free tier is, by a wide margin. We wrote up the broader open-source booking landscape separately, including where the licences actually differ.

Calendly keeps coming up and it's the wrong shape

It ranks for this search, so it's worth thirty seconds. Calendly's free plan allows one active event type and one calendar connection. One event type means one bookable service. A salon offering a cut, a colour and a treatment cannot use it, and the limit isn't a soft cap you grow into — it's the first thing you hit.

Calendly is very good at what it was built for, which is putting a meeting in two people's calendars. Selling a service with a duration, a staff member and a price is a different problem, and the free plan makes that distinction unusually obvious.

Our free tier can't take money, and that's deliberate

Opencals has a free plan and I want to be precise about what it is, because it isn't a free booking business.

A development store is free forever, with no card and no trial countdown. Every feature and every API endpoint works, and it comes seeded with a real business — services, staff, locations, customers, appointments and orders — so you can point one of our Next.js templates at it and have a working booking site in a few minutes. What it runs in is test mode. It cannot take a real payment from a real customer. That's the wall, it's a hard one, and it's there on purpose: the dev store exists so developers and agencies can evaluate the API properly before anyone's card is involved, not so a salon can run for free.

When you switch it to production, we charge $0.99 per completed appointment with no monthly fee, or $14.98 a month for 300 appointments if that's cheaper for your volume — which it is past about sixteen bookings a month. A month with no bookings costs nothing on the per-booking plan, which is the closest thing to "free" we offer a live business, and it's the reason the pricing works that way at all. Full numbers are on the pricing page.

So: if you have four staff or fewer, don't take deposits, and can live with email-only reminders, start on Setmore Free and don't overthink it. If you take most of your money by card and want no-show fees later, start on Square Free. If you're building a booking flow into something you're already writing, take a development store and read the API docs. And if you're past the point where a free plan is the constraint, the paid comparison is over here.